As it goes high-tech, wildlife biology loses its soulhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.21/as-it-goes-high-tech-wildlife-biology-loses-its-soul
We're learning a lot by monitoring wild animals, but the high tech methods used to track them take some of the mystery out of our relationship with the wild.
In 1978, I was researching one of my first wildlife stories, working along the North Fork of the Flathead River in northwestern Montana, one of the wildest places in the Lower 48. A wolf was believed to be prowling into Montana from British Columbia –– an important discovery if true, because wolves had been absent from the American West for half a century and this might indicate their possible resurgence in the region. Researchers had found scat and tracks –– tantalizing evidence of at least one animal. The question was: Were wolves living there or just passing through?

Locating wolves at the time was a laborious and primitive process. I hiked trails with researchers, hands cupped to our mouths, doing our best to imitate wolf howls and hoping for a reply.

In 1979, the Border Wolf Project researchers captured their first wolf -- a female they named Kishneana, honoring the creek where she was trapped. They radio-collared her, and later that year I flew with project head Robert Ream above the purling North Fork, watching as he used a radio receiver with a handheld antenna to zero in on the faint rhythmic ticking of the collar's transmissions. Every 10 days or so, for a brief window of time, biologists flew above the North Fork to get a general idea of Kishneana's whereabouts. But that was all they could determine with the available technology; the rest of her life was a mystery.

These days, wolves have few secrets. Some are monitored constantly through GPS collars that link to orbiting satellites, reporting their locations with such high-tech precision that the animals are jokingly referred to as "robo-wolves." If an un-collared pack gets into trouble, killing cattle or llamas, federal wildlife-control agents may create a "Judas wolf": They trap and collar one of the pack's members and follow it, then kill the whole pack when the wolves reunite.

The type of radio collar that was strapped onto Kishneana in '79 is as old-fashioned now as a wall phone. It's been surpassed by far more powerful technologies that would have seemed like science fiction a few decades ago. Today, some researchers can map wildlife 24 hours a day from the comfort of their offices, instead of, say, doing it once a week by driving dirt roads, hiking or flying.

Remote, automatically operated camera traps are ubiquitous, snapping pictures of wildlife in remote locations that can't otherwise be monitored. Just as cops use facial recognition software to help track down possible criminals, biologists now use software and cameras to identify individual animals by the patterns on their coats –– even in the irises of their eyes.

Tiny helicopters take breath samples from whales while hovering over their blowholes; aerial drones monitor orangutans; and endangered black-footed ferrets have been implanted with transponder chips that can be read by sensors buried in the dirt around their burrows, scanning their comings and goings, like groceries at the supermarket. DNA and isotopes in hair or nails are parsed in new ways to determine exactly how individual animals exploit the specific aspects of landscapes.

Even imitation wolf howls have gone high tech, thanks to the Howlbox, a kind of wilderness boom-box that sends out a pre-recorded howl. It also records the real-world answer, while doing a sonic analysis to identify the individual wolf that returned the call.

As the discovery and application of these new technologies accelerates, our understanding of wildlife increases exponentially. Despite limits imposed by politics and budgets, it's helped our efforts to protect species in an increasingly crowded, developed and fragmented world. Yet there are drawbacks. Even some biologists think that the high-tech approach to wildlife diminishes the wonder of the wild, and sacrifices the unique knowledge that comes from laborious, on-the-ground fieldwork. As the technological rush even gets into wildlife genetics in new ways, it's a good time to reflect on how much things have changed -- and where we seem to be headed.

Since I listened to the simple pinging from that 1979 wolf collar, technology's potential to improve wildlife conservation has been proven by many researchers. In the 1990s, for instance, Brian Woodbridge, a Forest Service researcher in Northern California, encountered a mystery. Many of the Swainson's hawks he studied -- a species also known as "grasshopper hawks" or "locust hawks" because that's their primary food -- were leaving Butte Valley National Grasslands as winter approached and for some reason they were not returning in the spring. Woodbridge heard about a lightweight satellite transmitter that could be fixed to a bird's feathers, to broadcast a signal about its whereabouts to a satellite. So he trapped two hawks and fastened the transmitters, each a little heavier than a silver dollar, to their tail feathers. In the fall of 1997, the hawks circled into the sky wearing the $3,000 instruments and headed due south, chasing summer. One of the hawks was never heard from again, but two months later the other beamed a signal from a region in Argentina called La Pampa, some 6,000 miles from California. It was the first time anyone knew where that species went for the winter -- an ornithological riddle until modern technologies came along. ----

The next year, Woodbridge and two colleagues traveled to the hawks' wintering ground in Argentina to try to find out why so many were disappearing. They were astonished. Back in California's Butte Valley, he'd spotted the hawks only occasionally, but in Argentina he discovered huge flocks -- sometimes thousands of hawks -- roosting in non-native eucalyptus groves called montes. And something was obviously very wrong: As he drove to a ranch to find the hawk he'd outfitted with the transmitter, he passed hundreds of dead birds on the ground. Woodbridge found that the farmers there had started using a deadly pesticide called monocrotophos. Hawks were drawn to spraying operations to gobble up squirming, dying grasshoppers and ingesting toxic amounts of the pesticide. Some died with grasshoppers in their talons, having absorbed the poison through their feet. In some cases, a fifth of the birds that roosted in a given monte were killed.

Woodbridge's pioneering research with satellite telemetry led to the formation of the International Swainson Hawk Working Group, which met with Argentine farmers and pesticide manufacturers, who eventually agreed to phase out toxic pesticides. "Satellite receivers were transformative," Woodbridge told me.

I had the same thought in 2005, when -- under the glow of four headlamps in Glacier National Park -- I watched as four biologists unwrapped the down coat covering an anesthetized wolverine and swabbed its belly in preparation for surgery. It was a typical combination of old and new technology: They had captured the wolverine in a hand-hewn log trap that snapped shut when the animal yanked on a piece of meat. When Jeff Copeland, the head of that U.S. Forest Service research project, approached the captive wolverine -- dryly named "M-1" -- it snarled and growled, and as he carefully opened the trap's lid to peek in, it lunged at him, taking a chunk out of the log near his hand. Copeland gingerly used a jab stick with a hypodermic at the end to sedate the wolverine and, after it fell asleep, picked it up and brought it to the table, where they operated. The biologists carefully sliced open the wolverine's belly and implanted a tiny satellite transmitter under the skin.

They wanted to find out where wolverines go in the forest, and how much snowmobiles and other winter recreation are invading the species' winter redoubts, and whether the Endangered Species Act should require protection of the habitat. Once the wolverine was released, they tracked it every two hours, using satellites, watching as it crossed 25 miles of a snow-covered mountain range in one day, and 25 miles the next. Wolverines are rare and secretive animals, so no one knew about their wide-ranging nature until some were successfully collared and tracked. Now the discussion of whether that species and its surprisingly large habitat need legal protection can incorporate the researchers' findings, including the fact that a male wolverine's home range spans 500 square miles. As Copeland said, "The hallmark of the wolverine is its insatiable need to keep moving."

In 2008, I visited a concrete underpass on Interstate 90 in the mountains west of Missoula, Mont., with Chris Servheen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who's a long-time leader in the effort to protect and increase grizzly bear populations. As we walked the dirt and gravel between gray pillars and under a massive gray roof, with tractor trailers and cars whizzing overhead, Servheen pointed out the heat- and motion-activated cameras mounted in various places.

Hundreds of grizzly bears roam the mountains north of the highway, in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which includes Glacier National Park. But almost none have been spotted to the south, in good habitat whose core is the sprawling Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. In the 1990s, biologists proposed moving bears into the Selway-Bitterroot, but Congress, reacting to the anxieties of some locals, forbade it. Now biologists are hoping grizzlies will move there on their own, but I-90, with six lanes of high-speed traffic and several rows of concrete jersey barriers, remains an obstacle. The bears seem to refuse to use the underpass. A few years into this monitoring project, the cameras in the underpass have snapped pictures of deer and a host of other critters, including ATV riders, but no grizzlies.

Servheen's career, like mine, has spanned the evolution of the new technology. He remembers how the old-style radio collars required biologists to go airborne just to discover "where a bear was twice a week, during good weather, at 10 a.m.," he said, adding wryly, "If you know where I was at 10 o'clock in the morning twice a week, and you tried to draw conclusions about the places I like to go in my weekly activities, you would be pretty limited."

In contrast, the modern collars can find a bear 24 hours a day with an astonishing degree of accuracy, pinpointing an animal within 10 yards of its actual location. Sometimes biologists still go airborne to gather data, but as they fly over a bear, the collar is "interrogated" by an onboard computer, the data is beamed skyward and, in a few seconds, the entire trove is downloaded remotely into a portable laptop. Some modern collars contain a bolt-shearing mechanism set to go off at a predetermined time, reducing stress on both the bear and the biologists who retrieve its collar. "The bear stands there, there's a little pop and it falls off its neck," Servheen said.

The modern collars report in great detail where grizzly bears travel over periods as long as two years, exposing their behavior far more accurately than a TV "reality show" would. We've learned that the huge bears come surprisingly close to people's homes at night, moving so surreptitiously that the residents don't see them. That warns managers when to ask people to remove bird feeders and other bear attractants.

"The technology gives us a much better and more profound understanding of how bears respond to human activity on the landscape, and how we can better manage that human activity," said Servheen. "We can identify the places where bears cross the highway, so if a group like The Nature Conservancy wants to put in a conservation easement to protect a crossing, we know exactly where that is and can get the biggest bang for the buck." Even so, we still don't know for sure why grizzlies refuse to use that I-90 underpass.

Kate Kendall, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in West Glacier, Mont., has created her own special recipe for grizzly bear soup: She dumps assorted carp, trout and other fish into a 55-gallon drum, and stirs in cattle blood gathered from slaughterhouses. Then she seals the fetid concoction and lets it age for a year, until it's good and ripe. "Then we open the drums and bottle it," she told me recently.

Last summer, Kendall and 75 others on her crew wrapped barbed wire around stands of pine trees at 395 locations in northwestern Montana's two-and-a-quarter-million-acre Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem, to create what she calls "hair corrals." In the center of each corral, the team placed a generous dollop of Kendall's homemade lure on a pile of brush and stumps.

Remote cameras show that after the team left each corral, it seldom took long for the scent to work its magic. As the bears sneak under the wire to check out the heavenly smell, the barbs snag clumps of their hair. That project snagged 17,000 hair samples in that ecosystem. Once black bear hair is excluded from the samples, the DNA -- the basic genetic material -- in each grizzly hair will be assayed. In 2014, for the first time ever, the local people will have a realistic idea of how many grizzly bears live in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, where they go and even their kinship: which bears are related to others and in what ways. That will give bear managers a much better sense of how many animals they are dealing with, compared to previous estimates based on radio collars and sightings. Moreover, the bears will never see a human being, never be drugged, and probably never know they have been studied. ----

A similar project led by Kendall in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem revealed a dramatic finding by the time it ended in 2008. Biologists had estimated that 300 grizzlies lived in that ecosystem, but the DNA results indicated more than twice that: 765, all told. "That's a totally different story," Kendall said. "Population numbers and trends are critical (for determining) if conservation methods are effective."

DNA analysis is revolutionizing wildlife research in many ways. It allows researchers to easily collect data on more than one animal, for instance. The old method -- live trapping -- allows researchers to sample blood and tissue from just a few bears. But collecting DNA in scat or hair allows them to gather information on two or three dozen, or even two or three hundred. They can calculate not only basic population numbers, but -- as Kendall has done -- relationships. Servheen's agency has assembled a complete family tree of all the grizzly bears between the Yukon and Yellowstone. In one example of how that's useful, when a grizzly was killed in the Selway-Bitterroot in 2007, DNA revealed that it had come from the Selkirk Mountains in northern Idaho -- an indication of a migration corridor that needs to be preserved.

"The genetic code is a mystery novel, a history book and a time log in a single hair," Michael Schwartz, a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, observed recently. "We are answering questions we couldn't even ask a few years ago." He described a potential breakthrough regarding pneumonia in bighorn sheep, which often catch it from domestic sheep; the domestic sheep are merely carriers, but the disease is often fatal to bighorns. Agricultural researchers know which genes govern disease resistance in domestic sheep, and now biologists can sequence the bighorns' genes and try to determine if some bighorns have a similar genetic resistance. "The gene for resistance may have drifted out of (a bighorn) population through random processes," Schwartz said, "so we know we need to bring in these genes" from other herds.

In Portugal, DNA researchers lined the back wall of a lynx den with cork, and placed a parasitic Amazonian kissing bug in a quarter-sized hole covered with a thin plastic membrane. When the lynx entered the den, the bug drilled through the plastic, bit the lynx and sucked its blood. After the cat left, they recaptured the bug and examined the blood and DNA it contained. Researchers in Vietnam who analyzed the blood from 25 leeches found genetic material from three mammal species that were rare and not well understood, including two that were only recently discovered -- a deer called the Truong Son muntjac and the Annamite striped rabbit.

In a visit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in upstate New York -- the premier institution for the study of birds, with a staff of 50 scientists and educators -- I was amazed by the range of new approaches there, especially the use of sound. The lab has developed software that identifies the noises many kinds of animals make, and offers that software to researchers around the world. The lab also has built a vast audio library, and anyone with Internet access can hear thousands of distinctive birdsongs and the various calls of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and even arthropods. The study of birds began long before binoculars were available; pioneering ornithologist John James Audubon, in the early 19th century, had to shoot birds to study them up close. Today's technologies include arrays of microphones and radar installations to gather data as flocks of snow geese and migrating hummingbirds pass overhead.

At the University of Montana Flight Research Lab, I've watched researchers like Bret Tobalske use lasers and other tools to discover exactly how birds fly, and even to explore how their habitat shapes their physiology. In one experiment in the warehouse-like flight lab, while a Rolling Stones recording rocked out in the background, Tobalske placed a small hummingbird he had captured in his yard into a plexiglass cube. As the tiny bird hovered and drank from a feeding tube, an emerald green laser beam illuminated a fine cloud of olive oil hanging in the air. A camera recorded the movement of the swirling mist, detailing how lift, drag and other forces work on the bird as it flies. By understanding a bird's flying strategies, scientists can learn more about its ecology. The hairy woodpecker, for instance, has evolved a technique to get from one bug-infested tree to another as fast as possible using a minimal amount of energy, with a distinctive combination of flapping and gliding flight. "Flight is extraordinarily expensive per second (when it comes to energy use) and birds have evolved ways to sidestep some of those costs," Tobalske said. "It tells us something about (how they deal with) predator risks and why they feed where they do."

Meanwhile, isotopes -- stable compounds created primarily by the planet's geologic processes and then naturally dissolved in water -- are being interpreted in new ways to monitor wildlife. When clouds move across the landscape and drop rain, they leave hydrogen, carbon and deuterium and other isotopes in soil and vegetation in unique and varied ratios. So the isotopic fingerprint of, say, the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park is different than that of the Pelican Valley, which is also in the park. When a bear or mountain lion drinks water from different sources, a record of those isotopes is formed in its hair or claws, and biologists can later analyze it to determine where the animal has been drinking. Researchers analyzing isotopes can also identify what portion of a bear's diet is meat, vegetation or fish. The technique does not require trapping the animal, but it does require gathering isotopic ratios across vast areas -- known as "isoscapes" -- to accurately compare an animal's tissue with the places on the landscape it has visited.

That technology has other uses: After a camper was attacked and killed by a grizzly near Yellowstone in 2010, for instance, biologists killed the bear and tested a snip of its hair for a corn isotope. Since almost every processed food contains corn syrup, they could discover if the bear in question had been corrupted by human garbage. In this case, it hadn't.----

Fishery biologists in Yellowstone remove the calcium carbonate otolith, or "ear-stone," from dead fish to discover where the fish swam when they were alive. Tom McMahon, a professor of fishery biology at Montana State University, explained that technique: The otolith forms as a fish grows, and incorporates distinctive isotopes from each tributary it visits, so by analyzing it, "You can backtrack on (the fish's) movements through its entire life."

But I've heard a cautionary tone from several biologists over the years. Even Brian Woodbridge, the Swainson's hawk researcher who used early transmitters to discover migrations and threats posed by pesticides in Latin America, said the technology would not have played such a transformative role, if the researchers hadn't done the long-term fieldwork that included banding and watching the birds. Those traditional methods determined the basic population dynamics and the significance of the fact that the hawk's numbers were dropping. "Patterns emerge over time, that you can't get through technology in the short term," Woodbridge said.

Denver Holt, head of the Montana-based Owl Research Institute, had similar thoughts on a sunny day last March, when he drove me to a subdivision north of Polson, Mont., to show me more than a dozen bright white snowy owls -- aka "snowies" -- sitting on rooftops. In the same area, Holt pointed out a black golf-ball-sized owl "pellet" -- indigestible remains of an owl's meal -- lying on the ground. Holt, who has studied snowies in the field for 25 years, often following them to the Arctic where they spend most of their time, concluded that this pellet had been regurgitated by a snowy that had devoured voles. He took out his binoculars and looked through them upside-down, using them as a magnifying glass, to find tiny bones in the pellet. "Hmm, fibula ... tibia," he said, "and here's a humerus," as he pulled out a leg bone the size of a paper match. "Ought to be a skull in here somewhere," he predicted as he pawed through the black mass. And, sure enough, there was.

Long-term field studies like those Holt has conducted are increasingly rare. He believes they bring something unique and powerful to the table, even though they are difficult and hard to fund. "If you are on the ground, touring the field, making observations, you start to see patterns," he told me. "And if you aren't in the field, you would miss the unusual events that happen. If a snowy owl attacked a polar bear or a caribou that was getting too close to a nest or a chick, you wouldn't see that with just (transmitter) technology. You would have beeps on a map that might tell you something was going on, but you wouldn't know what it was." He worries that high-tech will supplant, rather than complement, long-term field studies. "You don't want to totally abandon field research," Holt said. "What you want to do is combine them, try to get the best out of both types."

Ed Bangs, probably the most well-known wildlife biologist in the Northern Rockies, shared his philosophical thoughts over breakfast in Helena, Mont., where we both live. For most of the history of federal wolf reintroduction in the Rockies, Bangs was the chief spokesman and manager; he retired in 2011. Over the years, after traveling with him to several wolf-related meetings and other events, I'd come to believe that he thought more deeply about the work than most of his colleagues. "You never need to go into the field" anymore, Bangs said, given today's technology. "You collar the animal and follow it in real time on the computer. You never see it; you never see where it lives. You can do a wildlife study and never visit the area. ... I became involved in wildlife research because of my passion for wildlife and wild places -- and technology doesn't catch that passion. We need more of an emotional connection with wildlife ... not just technological connections."

We talked about how the new technology encourages many researchers to think there is less need to spend dogged days, weeks and months in the field watching wildlife. Like Woodbridge and Holt, Bangs also believes long-term fieldwork can lead to a deeper, or least different, understanding of wildlife ways and habitat. Some in their camp also fear there has been a steady erosion in the sense of wildness, the feeling of mystery, much as the sense of freedom in the human world is being changed by surveillance technology. In some cases, Bangs warned, the new technologies not only don't further conservation, they may hinder it.

"Conservation involves managing people more than it does wildlife," said Bangs, drawing from his long experience in trying to persuade ranchers and hunters to accept wolves that kill livestock and elk, while also trying to persuade environmentalists that it's OK to shoot and trap some wolves. "Learning more about wolves is almost immaterial to wolf conservation. Some biologists don't even go out in the field anymore. How does it further conservation if you don't know about the people?"

Day by day, the advance of the new technologies raises more ethical questions. With the power to work with DNA growing by leaps and bounds, the revival of extinct species may not be far off. The veteran environmentalist Stewart Brand -- editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of several green organizations, including the Long Now Foundation -- has helped launch a new project called Revive and Restore, dedicated to "de-extinction" of vanished species. The first species Revive and Restore may try to pluck out of the black hole of extinction is the passenger pigeon, the last of which died out in 1914. So far, only preliminary steps have been taken -- the genes of several museum specimens are being sequenced -- but Brand thinks it is doable in the not-too-distant future. In Revive and Restore's first meeting, at Harvard last February, Brand told me, "The practicalities are getting more practical all the time." In Spain a few years ago, in fact, researchers cloned an extinct ibex, a wild mountain goat, though it only lived a very short time.

Even the high-tech collars raise uncomfortable management questions. How far do you go to make a species palatable to people who are antagonistic to it? Collars can measure whether the animal is resting or active, by its heart rate and body temperature. But they can also be programmed to control an animal. Shock collars, similar to those put on ornery dogs, for instance, have been tested on wolves; when the wolves tried to roam beyond a fence of sensors controlled by a satellite, they were shocked. As the whole realm of wildlife conservation grows ever more controversial, biologists have also experimented with wolf collars that have tranquilizers in them, and can be activated remotely. Some ranchers, Bangs said, have joked that such a collar could also be packed with explosives that could be detonated remotely -- the kind of fate that might be in store for prisoners on a totalitarian planet in science fiction. In today's brave new world, or habitat, if things go that far eventually, it wouldn't surprise me.

---

Jim Robbins is a longtime New York Times writer based in Helena, Mont., and the author of five books, including this year’s The Man Who Planted Trees. His Times stories over the years included some of the experiences in this essay.

This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

]]>No publisherWildlife2012/12/17 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOn the path to a greener churchhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/185/5993
Spokane Bishop William Skylstad brings his rural and
environmental background to the task of heading the steering
committee on the Northwestern bishops' pastoral letter.Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue's feature story.

An organization with as much heft as the Catholic Church, and with 2,000 years of history, does not move quickly or simply. The Columbia River Basin pastoral letter, scheduled for release in November, has been five years in the making.

But even five years understates the letter's roots. Part of a movement toward a broadened social consciousness, it began in 1891, when Pope Leo issued an encyclical deploring sweatshops. The encyclical resulted in the establishment of offices within most dioceses to work as advocates for labor and low-income groups.

The next major step came with the pope's World Day of Peace message in January 1990, called "The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility," which began a greening of Catholic theology. "We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations," Pope John Paul II said. "Delicate ecological balances are upset by the uncontrolled destruction of animal and plant life or by a reckless exploitation of natural resources."

The U.S. Conference of Bishops followed up with a report in 1991 called Renewing the Earth, which said that a "fundamental relation between humanity and nature is one of caring for creation."

In May 1995, a group of some 30 Catholic theologians and ethicists from the Environmental Justice Program of the U.S. Catholic Conference gathered at Mount Angel Abbey in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon to reflect on how the Catholic church regarded ecology.

Several Catholics from the West and Northwest who were at the Mount Angel meeting got together to talk informally about what they could do. "Everyone in the circle reiterated the word water," says Frank Fromherz, one of the attendees who works in the Office of Justice and Peace in the Portland Diocese. While they were encouraged by the pope's message and the bishop's statements, those were generalities. They wanted a statement that was anchored in a place. Nothing stood out like the Columbia.

People at the Mount Angel meeting also felt that the debate over the river needed to be reframed, from a strictly economic and scientific perspective into one that included moral and religious dimensions. Fromherz says, "Rather than as an engine of commerce, a lot of people think the river should be viewed as revelatory, revelatory of the presence of God."

The idea of a pastoral letter was raised. Lay Catholics at the Mount Angel meeting asked Bishop William Skylstad, who heads the Spokane Diocese, if he would head the steering committee.

Skylstad, by his own account, has become a "green" bishop, especially in the last few years. He brings ecological and rural backgrounds to the task. He was part of the bishops' domestic policy committee that wrote the Renewing the Earth statement, and a few years ago he attended a seminal conference, the National Partnership for Religion and the Environment, which brought the leaders of five major religions together to discuss the environment.

From 1995 to 1998, Skylstad was chairman of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. The NCRLC is part of the heritage of Pope Leo's 1891 message that sparked a social reform movement within the church. Formed in 1923, it is active in everything from support service for rural ministries, to assuring fair wages for farm workers, to preserving family farms, to lobbying on issues that affect farmers, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization.

The pastoral letter is not only concerned with restoring the health of the river and protecting salmon, but also with the well-being of rural people. "Native peoples' rights have been ignored, even when guaranteed by treaties and laws," the letter reads. "Working people's wages are sometimes below poverty level. Habitat for many species is violated."

When it is released, the pastoral letter on the Columbia River won't have the same clout as an encyclical, which comes from the pope. Pastoral letters are bottom-up documents, generated by the bishops of a region or a country with input from priests and laypeople.

But they have a long and honorable past, says John Hart, the theology and environment professor at Carroll College in Helena, Mont., and the writer of the letter. "Paul wrote the first letters in the first century to give instruction as to beliefs and practices in the early Christian Church."

Pastoral letters can deal with any subject affecting Catholic life and worship. Important letters from the United States bishops include Healing Racism Through Faith and Truth, Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, Quest for Justice, and The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. In the 1980s, Hart helped write a pastoral letter from Midwestern bishops that decried the takeover of family farms by corporations; another denounced the powerlessness of the poor in Appalachia.

]]>No publisherCommunities2000/09/11 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHoly waterhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/185/5991
A pastoral letter being prepared by the Catholic bishops
of the Northwest calls Catholics and others to a new environmental,
economic and spiritual relationship with a sacred river - the
Columbia.Beneath nickel-gray clouds that hang heavily over the hills of downtown Seattle, Archbishop Alex Brunett enters towering St. James Cathedral, his footfalls breaking the spell of a quiet afternoon. A handful of parishioners kneeling or sitting quietly in the pews glance up at their spiritual leader, who is talking in an animated fashion about a baptismal font on the floor of the church. We have walked over from his chancery office across from the cathedral because he wants to make a point about the role of water in Catholic theology.

"The water isn't just sitting there," says the archbishop, gesturing toward the small pool, the water in it circulated by a pump. "We don't baptize people in stagnant water, but flowing water. Water that is alive."

That belief in living water is the reason, he says, that he and seven fellow Roman Catholic bishops from Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia have spent the past three years traveling the Columbia River Basin and listening to hundreds of parishioners talk about the river, its salmon, and the economy created by the river.

The result of those trips and hearings will be a rarely issued document called a pastoral letter, to be released late this year or early next. Drafts have been circulating for over a year. The latest version of The Columbia River Watershed: Realities and Possibilities - A Reflection in Preparation of a Pastoral Letter calls on Catholics and others to forge a new environmental and spiritual awareness about the Columbia River watershed.

Catholic leaders say the letter came about because the river is in desperate straits from a century of logging, mining, grazing and dam building. Sixteen million salmon once migrated from the Pacific each year to spawn in one of the 28 tributaries along the 1,200-mile-long Columbia; now 700,000 make the journey (HCN, 12/20/99: Unleashing the Snake).

"It is a gift of Creation," Brunett says of the river. "We have to use this gift, but in a way that we don't destroy it. In sermons we urge people to step up and be counted for what they believe. If we believe the river is sacred, we need to say so."

Here is what the two archbishops and six bishops who direct the church in the five states and one Canadian province stand up and say about the Columbia River in the latest 65-page draft:

"There are problems and injustices in the watershed ' Salmon, the indicator species of the life community, are becoming extinct, endangered or threatened ' Greed, ignorance, irresponsibility and abuse of economic and political power cause problems and injustices."

And that's on the second page.

The eight Catholic prelates in the Pacific Northwest lead 1.2 million Catholic parishioners spread over 260,000 square miles in two countries. Catholics are 25 percent of the region's total population and make up the region's largest single church.

The Catholic presence goes back to the mid-19th century, when missions were among the first European settlements. Catholicism cuts across all boundaries - Indians, miners, businesspeople, Sierra Club members, loggers, irrigators, fishermen and insurance salesmen.

No one has taken a poll, but it is possible that Native Americans are paying the most attention to the evolution of the pastoral letter.

"Some switch has gone on; maybe God has spoken to them," jokes Donald Sampson, executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a Yakama Indian and a fisheries biologist. "I hope the pope gets on board."

Then Sampson grows serious. "They came into our country, and the Church was the stronghold for civilization and spreading the gospel and eliminating native religious practices and belief." Sampson's grandmother, he says, told him what happened to her in a Catholic boarding school.

"If she spoke her language she was beaten. They cut her hair and made her march in line. The priests didn't want the Indian people digging roots and following fish.

"Now they're saying, 'We screwed up'. The church is being up-front and dispelling the myth of Manifest Destiny and dominion over the earth. That's refreshing and welcome. But I'd like to see them call for action rather than just reflect."

Sampson would especially like to see the document call for the breaching of the four Snake River dams - a position the letter does not take.

If the final version of the letter in November does call for breaching, it will probably be because of Spokane Bishop William Skylstad, whom many describe as most responsible for moving the letter forward.

Skylstad was asked to lead the effort by a group of lay Catholics, who in 1995 chose the Columbia River as most in need of attention (see story on page 11). He thinks they came to him "because I grew up on a tributary of the Columbia. I grew up in an apple orchard" along the Methow River in western Washington.

"As a child and youth, I remember the constant roaring of the rapidly flowing river as the waters made their way to the sea." He speaks of "a sense of awe and appreciation for this wonderful gift and treasure in our midst, the flowing waters of life."

But lofty religious agendas need to thread their way through the mundane politics of bureaucracy, especially one as large and multidimensional as the Roman Catholic Church. Sklystad has had to deal with the arrival of four new bishops in the region who were not originally part of the project, and not all of whom were comfortable with it. Then there is the task of pleasing people united by Catholicism but divided in every other conceivable way.

"He is skilled politically in the best sense of the word," says John Hart, a professor of theology and the environment at Carroll College, in Helena, Mont. "He's well-respected, sincere and not manipulative. And when he runs a meeting he is very open to the ideas of others."

Yet firm. Kirwin Werner, a Catholic who teaches science at the Salish Kootenai College in Montana, attended a meeting on the letter during which a logger harangued Skylstad at length. "Skylstad stood up to him," Werner recalls, impressed. "And when he (the logger) was done, Skylstad told him, "Well, times have changed."

No one knows those changes better than the steering committee that has guided the letter's progress for the last three years. Headed by Skylstad, it is composed of representatives appointed by each bishop, as well as representatives of the region's Catholic colleges. The committee began its work, in Catholic parlance, with "a reading of the Signs of the Times." (If it had been a federal agency, it would have been called "scoping." ) Skylstad and the rest of the committee traveled to eight meetings - one per diocese - between November 1997 and February 1999.

When they met at the federal research facility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, "We told them we didn't just want a tour, we wanted to know what was really going on," says John Reid, a leadership and organizational consultant in Seattle who is also director of the Columbia River Pastoral Letter Project. "We learned that millions of gallons of radioactive water was stored in tanks with 20-year life spans, in the 1940s, and is now leaking into the groundwater," and may spill into the river at one of its wildest places - Hanford Reach.

The committee also visited Castlegar, British Columbia, where Canadian farmers were forced to sell their land decades ago to make way for the reservoirs behind U.S. dams. Now they want their land back or more compensation. And they met in Hermiston, Wash., with Indians who are for breaching the dams and farmers who are against it. They talked with migrant workers, Native American leaders, wheat farmers, and aluminum smelter workers whose jobs depend on cheap hydropower.

The hearings, says steering committee member J.L. Drouhard, who works for the Justice and Peace Office in the Seattle Diocese, were instructive.

"None of the bishops would have been described as an environmentalist walking into it," he says. "All of them are coming to be more environmentalist."

Skylstad says he was pleased with the dialogue. "We never had any great anger," he says. "We're looking at complex decisions that have to be made. There might be sacrifices made; somehow we will do that in a collaborative way that will respect people and traditions. While there were clear and strong viewpoints, everything was done in a respectful dialogue."

The meetings may have been mostly civil, but some of the behind-the-scenes politicking has been less so. Skylstad plays down the controversies, but it is clear that there were objections.

"People said it was too much of a blaming document" in early drafts, Skylstad says. "Given our knowledge and expertise now, we might have made a lot of different decisions about things that were done years ago. But we tried to steer clear about taking off after certain people."

After the hearings, Hart wrote a draft - the one that Skylstad says might have been too blaming - and sent it to the steering committee and to consultants in areas such as the natural sciences. Then Hart wrote another draft. This one was posted on the Web site and comments were invited, making it the first pastoral letter to use the Internet. Then a third draft was written and given to the bishops, who will revise and then release the final version this fall.

Both the deliberate pace and the outreach have helped mute some opposition and have drawn others into the process. Dave Zepponi is a Catholic and director of environmental affairs for the Northwest Food Processors, a coalition of fruit, vegetable, dairy and bakery processors in the region.

"I still don't know what the letter is going to look like, but it's been a useful exercise to help people focus on the deeper sense of perspective on the river system," he says.

But after the second draft was posted on a church Web site, Hart received a flurry of angry e-mails and calls that accused him of "hiding behind the skirts of the bishop." And members of wise-use groups have shown up at some of the meetings, including one in Helena, Mont., and made their point - loudly.

Another time, a local mining engineer came to Hart's office with his two children. For two hours he tried to convince Hart that mining was not the demon it was made out to be, pointing out that "the cathedral in Helena was built with mining money."

"I told him that just because mining was beneficial to the church in the past, mining techniques are different today, and that while the church used to use asbestos to fireproof Catholic schools, it was found harmful to children and isn't used today," recalls Hart. Indeed, in the penultimate draft of the letter - A Reflection in Preparation for a Pastoral Letter - the bishops vow to reduce the use of gold in churches.

The response to the letter from Catholics in the region has been mostly positive, according to project consultant Reid. "Seventy-five percent are in favor, and people are saying things like, 'I am proud to be a Catholic' and 'My God, the Catholics are dealing with the real world', says Reid. But "20 to 25 percent are saying: 'How dare you,' 'You're being duped' or 'You've been co-opted by the eco-terrorists.' "

Some environmentalists and Indians say just the opposite. They speculate that the letter's failure to call for a breaching of four dams on the Snake River means the bishops were co-opted by their more conservative parishioners.

Sklystad says the letter is as strong as it can be, given the science. "We're not technical experts. We can offer spiritual reflection and offer guiding principles. We call people to good stewardship, to a sense of justice and a vision for the future. But to come down one way or the other in a technically complex area would overextend our expertise. We don't want to do something in the letter that would look silly three, four and five years down the road."

Those who want the church to take a position on certain technical issues miss the point, says Frank Fromherz of the Portland Diocese's Office of Justice and Peace. "It's not a giant anvil dropped into your garden with a thud. It's an invitation to think more deeply."

Supporters of the letter say that those who focus on the bishops' failure to call for dam removal miss the letter's important message: that the entire river is sacred. It calls the river and the watershed part of a "sacramental commons," and a sacrament in the Catholic definition is something that allows humans to connect with the divine. It is "a visible sign of an inward grace" according to one dictionary. Hart calls it "a moment of encounter with God."

"To say the river is a sacramental commons means people can experience the Creator in creation, outside the formal church settings," he continues.

It's also an important departure for the church, because it implies that a sacrament does not need to be mediated by a priest. It moves the church closer to the beliefs Native Americans in the West practiced until the Europeans - with the help of the Catholic Church - outlawed them.

The tribes' religious views are an integral part of the mix of politics, science, law and faith that come together in the debate over the river. To the Umatilla, Yakama, Nez Perce and Warm Springs tribes, known as the River People, salmon have always been a sacrament, in the same way that the bread and wine of the Catholic eucharist are a sacrament.

The salmon were once human, according to Indian beliefs, "and they created a place for the human beings and turned themselves into fish to provide food," says Sampson, of the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Each year when the first fish is caught, it is still divided among everyone in the community in the First Salmon ceremony.

The tribes also believe that the treaties they signed in 1855 were a sacred guarantee. If the salmon are wiped out, the tribes claim those treaties would be violated. So they have turned to science and politics to battle for their sacred beliefs. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission is composed of tribal representatives who advocate the protection of estuary habitat, in-stream flows, reintroduction of salmon, and other protection and reclamation measures, "to slowly reverse the problems that got us here," Sampson says. As part of the fight for the sacred, Sampson would like to see the church support the breaching of four dams along the Snake.

Although the draft fails to take a position on the dams or on dredging the mouth of the Columbia River to create a shipping channel, the bishops ask logging companies to remove timber in a sustainable manner, and end logging subsidized by taxpayers. They also ask that off-road vehicles and snowmobiles, which are "disruptive of forest creatures' need for habitat and humans' need for places to encounter the Presence of God in pristine creation, be confined to limited and legally constructed roads."

The letter ranges beyond habitat and salmon and trees to espouse a kind of eco-friendly utopia with sustainable jobs, protection of Native American treaty rights and the fostering of viable, family-owned farms in Canada as well as in the United States.

"Evils present in the watershed include racism, sexism, classism and speciesism," says the draft. "These evils are expressed in individual sin when particular persons express these evils; communal sin when a community is permeated by them; and structural sin when social systems and institutions - political, economic, educational or religious - embody them."

Such shifts in church teachings will not be easy for everyone. "It's more difficult for some than others, more difficult for people oriented toward what the church has said in the past," says Hart. "It's probably easier for people who look at the social context and apply tradition, rather than people who take tradition and apply it to social context."

It's often said that the devil is in the details. In this case, it may be God who is - or isn't - in the details. Has the church really gotten religion about the environment? What will the church do to make sure the letter doesn't end up in a file drawer somewhere, ignored by priests and parishioners?

"That the bishops are willing to do this is a significant development," says Dieter Hessel, director of the Program on Ecology, Justice and Faith, an interdenominational nonprofit group in Princeton, N.J. "How it's followed up - how rank-and-file Catholics respond - is a real question."

Though Native Americans may want the pastoral letter to call for breaching the dams, they also know that a theological shift is important - if it takes hold among the region's Catholics.

"It's easy to marginalize Native American religion," says Jeremy FiveCrows, a member of the Umatilla tribe and a public affairs specialist at the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. "It's a lot harder to marginalize your own religion."

The bishops are considering a committee to implement the letter at a parish level once it is completed. The church plans to create teaching documents, videos and palm cards to be handed out at church and available elsewhere, and it plans to encourage sermons at Mass.

The bishops also hope to work with groups within the watersheds that make up the huge Columbia River Basin. In Montana, the pastoral letter has already inspired a coalition of unions, environmentalists and church leaders to press for a cleanup of the Clark Fork River, by hiring people to do the cleanup work at a living wage.

Some critics, including Catholics, say there's a fundamental problem with the pastoral letter: It and the church refuse to deal with the issue of overpopulation.

"I told the bishop the church had its head in the closet with regard to the need for population control," says Kirwin Werner, who attended a meeting conducted by Helena Bishop Robert Morlino.

"We're going to have to tackle population control or it doesn't matter what kind of ecological measures we take." The bishop, he says, chastised him at the meeting for his comments.

Publicly, most Catholics involved with the letter adhere to the official position: There aren't too many people; there's an unequal distribution of resources. Privately, some involved in the letter think the church's position on birth control undercuts any major environmental statement the church makes.

It remains to be seen if the church's shift on the environment will lead to the much larger shift on population. Yet the environmental shift demonstrated in the latest pastoral letter draft is enormous. Not so long ago, Christianity was targeted as the cause of ecological problems.

The most famous attack came in 1967, when Lynn White Jr., a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, published "The historical roots of our ecological crisis' in the journal, Science. He argued that the dogma and world view of Judeo-Christian tradition made humanity arrogant.

"Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them," White wrote, interpreting the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. "God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: No item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purpose ... Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen."

This philosophical framework set the needs and wants of man above all else and allowed science and technology free rein, which caused great damage to the natural world, White concluded. "Christianity," he wrote "bears a huge burden of guilt."

Ideas are powerful, and as environmental problems have become more obvious, the environmental movement has gained great influence over the last three decades, just as organized religion was seeing its influence wane. Billed as an effort to reclaim a river, the pastoral letter may also be an effort by the Catholic Church to reclaim its relevance.

"It's not meant to resolve questions, but to point out the importance of this great river," said Archbishop Brunett. "People say, 'Stay in church where you belong,' but that's not what we've been called to be. We're trying to establish a sacredness in the world around us."

Freelancer Jim Robbins lives in Helena, Mont., where he writes about the West for the New York Times and others. Robbins' new book, A Symphony in the Brain: The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback, was published in May by Atlantic Monthly Press.

"They don't need to reintroduce wolves," says Diane Boyd, who for the past 15 years has studied wolves as they have migrated down from Canada and naturally recolonized the Glacier National Park ecosystem in northern Montana. "The wolves are doing it themselves. There's wild wolves all around Yellowstone."

Boyd has had the experience of watching and studying wolves as they naturally recolonized much of northwestern Montana. In 1979, Boyd and other researchers captured a lone female in a remote drainage just west of Glacier Park; now eight packs live in northern Montana, and the wolves are moving south to fill up vacant ecological niches.

"Wolves disperse," she says, "and they breed like rabbits." (Wolves produce one litter a year, with from three to 14 pups, depending on the quality of the habitat.. There is only one breeding pair in each pack - the "alpha wolves." )

Wolf sightings have been verified near Deer Lodge, Mont., 100 miles or so north of Yellowstone, and a wolf was shot there. Molecular DNA tests show it was related to wolves from northern Montana. A wolf was shot at Fox Creek in Wyoming, south of Yellowstone; another animal Boyd is certain is a wolf was filmed in Yellowstone.

Sharing Boyd's view is Robert Ream, a wildlife biologist who directed the study of wolves on the North Fork of the Flathead River on the park boundary. Park Service officials have said they haven't found wolves, but Ream says they haven't been looking hard. "People pushing for reintroduction have so much invested, it's hard for them to back off."

A wild wolf population is far preferable, Ream and Boyd say, to one created by humans.

Once wolves are brought in by the federal government, Boyd says, "there are no more natural wolves in Yellowstone." All canids, even ones that have come on their own, will be intensively managed. "It becomes a political rather than a biological population. Once the government puts the wolves in, they have to manage them. Forever."

In natural colonization, Boyd says, "There is a really strong selective process at work. Wolves that go to Yellowstone choose to go there. They ran the gantlet to get there. They don't eat livestock; they avoid people. They stay out of sight. Those behaviors are really good to pass on."

Ream says it's difficult to predict how long it might take for wolves, left on their own, to establish a breeding population - a reproducing male and female. "It could be happening now. It could happen in a year. But I would expect it to happen somewhere within the next two to 10 years."

Based on her experience on the North Fork, Boyd also believes that a natural population makes a lot of sense from a social perspective. "The wolves up north trickled in," she says. "The locals aren't wolf lovers, but they got used to it. Big Brother did not shove the wolves down their throat. That makes a huge difference. You need the support of the locals."

Jim Robbins writes in Helena, Montana.

]]>No publisherWildlife1995/02/06 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBusted town pursues industrial recreationhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/18/523
Anaconda wants to boost its economy by building a golf
course on top of its tailings piles.ANACONDA, Mont. - Can famous golfer Jack Nicklaus reverse the sagging fortunes of this crumbling smeltertown by building a golf course on top of a hazardous waste site?

The company that owns the site, Arco, is betting $10 million that he can (HCN, 11/29/93).

"Some people will say I lost my marbles," Nicklaus told Anacondans in late May when he broke ground for the new course. "But I think when we're done you'll be very proud of it."

In 1980, the last copper smelting ended, leaving behind a giant smokestack, thousands of unemployed smelter workers and a landscape strewn with a century's worth of hazardous waste.

Rather than simply reclaim the land and fence it off, as is usually done, Arco and the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to put the tailings to use. Arco proposed a golf course.

It is not a run-of-the-mill Nicklaus course. The $10 million tourist attraction "will have an industrial smelting theme," says Bill Finnegan, who is president of the Old Works Golf Course Authority, an independent entity created by Anaconda-Deer Lodge County.

Some of the greens will sit on top of heap roast piles - mounds of charred rock that were set afire decades ago to reduce ore into copper.

Sand traps will actually be slag traps, with black, granulated mining waste used in lieu of light-colored sand. The slag will come from a mammoth pile of coal-colored residue left over from the days when the giant smelter complex refined ore into copper. "It's better than the best sand that we've been able to find in the Ohio Valley," said Jon Scott, who works for Nicklaus' firm, Golden Bear Corp.

The huge brick stack from the smelter, meanwhile, towers over town and course.

The industrial theme carries over in other ways. Trains will take golfers to the course, but they may have to wait while other trains pass carrying processed slag from a nearby factory.

Many Anacondans are looking forward to their town's reincarnation as a tourist spot. Finnegan, who doesn't golf, thinks the fact the course sits atop a Superfund site won't keep golfers away. "The words 'toxic waste' bother me a lot, because of what it implies," he says. "It is not a Love Canal kind of thing."

The site's biggest problem is high levels of arsenic in the soil from smelting. Remedial workers will cap the tainted soil with two inches of limestone. Dirt will be spread on top of that and grass planted. Hot spots, where toxic levels on the course are high, will be out-of-bounds.

"It's safe," says Charlie Coleman, EPA project manager for the site. Building a golf course on a Superfund site, he says, is part of a trend toward using reclaimed land, rather just than fencing it off. "You can't just pick this volume of waste up and move it somewhere, it's too expensive," he says. "Our goal is to make these properties useful."

Anaconda is nestled in a mountain valley nearly a mile in altitude, at the headwaters of Warm Springs Creek. Mining magnate Marcus Daly, who found copper at Butte, beneath the "richest hill on earth," came to this site in 1885 and laid out a town to serve what was then a state-of-the-art smelter.

Fumes from the smelter have denuded hills behind the proposed course. The course will sit on the edge of town, sandwiched between Cedar Park Homes, a World War II era housing project, and the Cedar Lane bowling alley, a cinderblock building that sports a hand-painted picture of a bowling ball chasing pins.

With the grass requiring a year to grow, the Old Works course is scheduled to open in the spring of 1996. Greens fees are expected to be about $25 for 18 holes.

As white-shoed golfers replace workers capping and removing waste, boosters hope the post-industrial course will serve as a magnet for new businesses. Already, says Finnegan, who is also vice president at the Bank of Montana, representatives from a hotel, a restaurant and other businesses have called about the possibility of building near the course. The course itself is expected to create 30 to 50 jobs, 80 percent of them part-time.

The economic route Anaconda is pursuing may symbolize change in the West. As traditional resource industries diminish, towns are hoping to cash in on the booming tourist business.

Anaconda needs a ray of light. The population of Deer Lodge County, of which Anaconda is the largest city, has dropped from a peak of almost 19,000 people in 1960 to 10,000 today. Numerous historic brick buildings, gems from the 1800s, sit boarded up and abandoned.

Skeptics doubt whether Anaconda can change from smelter town to tourist town. Not only are there 10 small Superfund tracts in and around Anaconda, but the region, which includes Butte, is the largest Superfund complex in the country.

The other drawback is high altitude and notorious winters. In a good year, there may be just four or five months of golfing.

Some people also question whether the course can earn enough to cover the projected $500,000 a year in operating fees. And while officials from Arco say the course is a good way for the town to establish a new economy, some see it as a way for ARCO to avoid a more expensive clean-up.

"It's sleight of hand," said Bruce Farling, the executive director of Montana Trout Unlimited, who has spent years tracking the clean-up efforts in the area. "They don't have to do soil removal, they cap it. They don't have to worry about cleaning groundwater. It's absurd."

Jim Robbins writes in Helena, Montana.]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry1994/09/05 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCamping out in the Merry Widow Minehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/9/292
Merry Widow Mine a spa for arthritis sufferers.BOULDER, Mont. - Most people hear the word radon and think of an odorless, colorless gas that seeps into homes and can cause cancer. But some, like Denise Palmer, think of radon as a miracle drug.

Crippled with psoriatic arthritis, her hands had become so painful she could no longer pull her clothes on or make dinner.

"They had to carry me out of the house and put me in the camper to get me here," the 45-year-old Canadian woman says. "That's how bad I was."

"Here" is the Merry Widow Health Mine in southwestern Montana. Four days after she and her mother motored out of Edmonton, Alberta, and into Montana, Palmer slowly shuffles through the dampness of the old gold and silver mine in sneakers and a pink jogging suit. She looks happy. For the first time in five months, Palmer says, she can walk unaided, dress herself and enjoy her life.

The cure? Four hours a day for 10 days in the damp mine, inhaling radon gas, drinking and washing with radon-laced water and smearing radon-contaminated mud and moss scraped from the mine's dank walls onto her aching joints.

People come from around the world and pay good money to breathe naturally occurring high levels of the same gas the Environmental Protection Agency calls a leading threat to the nation's health. Believers claim this product of the disintegration of uranium is a miracle cure, and they make pilgrimages here for everything from diabetes to cataracts, bone spurs to hemorrhoids, warts to corns. Most come to treat the crippling disease of arthritis.

Experts say radon has no effect on arthritis. They say the only relief comes from exercising, applying heat and cold, reducing stress and taking anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin.

But all the cautionary tales in the world have not kept people away from folk remedies. Few are as unusual as the health mines of southwestern Montana.

In the late 1800s the rugged, pine-blanketed country between Boulder and Basin, Mont., some 30 miles south of Helena, the capital, was a booming gold and silver mining region. Many of the mines operated until the 1940s and 1950s. During the Atomic Age uranium mines opened and operated here as well.

The first of the health mines was the Free Enterprise, whose symbol is a man throwing away his crutches and jumping in the air to click his heels; its slogan: "The Unmedical Approach to Arthritis." The mine, which sits on a sagebrush-studded hill overlooking the picturesque town of Boulder, opened in 1951.

The supposed curative effects of the Free Enterprise were discovered when a woman who suffered from arthritis descended into the uranium mine every day to join her miner-husband for lunch. A couple of weeks after these underground lunches began she noticed her arthritis was nearly gone. Was it something in the baloney sandwiches? Further testing was carried out. An arthritic aunt visited and was brought into the mine for a series of therapeutic victuals. Her arthritis was said to clear up, too.

Soon so many ailing people were clamoring to be lowered into the mine that uranium mining stopped and a new kind of gold mine was born.

Now, a half dozen or so "health mines" dot the mountains, including the Lonetree, the Earth Angel and the Sunshine.

The Merry Widow is one of Montana's most popular health mines, located along Interstate 15 just outside of Basin. Several thousand people each year make a pilgrimage to this former gold mine, and thousands more to the other mines. One of the most celebrated regular Merry Widow visitors was General Omar Bradley, who led the U.S. invasion of Normandy in World War II.

The faithful who flock to the Merry Widow are mostly retired people who come from all over the United States and Canada. Many stay in trailers or recreational vehicles in a campground a short walk from the mine along the tree-lined Boulder River.

On a typical day mine-goers begin to wander up from the Merry Widow campground in the morning with towels draped over their necks and a styrofoam cup or a plastic squeeze bottle. They sign in with mine owner Helen O'Neill, who bought the place with her husband, Don, four years ago.

State health officials have limited how long people can be exposed - the maximum is 40 hours per year, about one-tenth the federal limit for uranium miners. So the full treatment is an hour, four times a day each day for 10 days. Each hour-long session costs $2.50.

Helen, who with her beehive hair and carefully plucked eyebrows looks like a country western singer, is down-home friendly to the folks who come here. She operates out of a homey little office, with a small kitchen and living room. A tiny teacup poodle snoozes in a recliner. Helen makes no wild claims about radon gas. Her customers do that for her. She pulls out a photo album full of letters and a video filled with testimony, all paeans to the relief that believers say emanates from the mine at Basin, Mont.

"Some people get relief right away," she says. "Most don't. It can happen in a few days, three months or five months."

As people enter the mine for the first time, Helen gets out the Geiger counter she keeps under the counter with her purse. She holds the detector - which looks like a small microphone - up to the visitor's nose. The black needle doesn't move. When the mine-sitters leave, she gets out her counter again. This time the instrument ticks frenetically, like a mad watch. "Because when they leave they're full of gas," Helen chirps, matter-of-factly.

Nearly tame chipmunks scamper outside the entrance to the Merry Widow, which is through a big wooden door with a sign that says "Positively no spitting." The adit is about eight feet wide and six feet high and goes 500 feet straight back into the mountain. The floor is poured concrete, and the passage is well lighted.

Just inside the mine is a small chamber with red vinyl benches, called the Poodle Parlor, where people can bring their ailing, blanket-wrapped dogs to take the cure.

At the back of the mine is the section for humans. Orange, glowing space heaters hang from the ceiling to ward off the underground chill, which hovers at about 55 degrees. In a small chamber to the left, two elderly couples are laughing and telling stories as they play cribbage on a table covered with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. A half dozen other people, wrapped in sweaters and jackets, sit on green bus seats bolted to the floor, reading old magazines and suspense novels.

Claustrophobia strikes some who walk into the bowels of the Earth. The Free Enterprise mine has solved that little problem. Air is pumped up from the mine into an "inhalatorium' - a small, windowless, paneled room with lawn chairs, books, tables and decks of cards.

Gas isn't the only reason people travel to the Merry Widow. The water here has healing power, some say. The clear, cold liquid trickles from an underground spring through a red rubber garden hose and into a trough that runs along the cavern wall. An elderly woman, her head festooned with curlers, is toweling her gnarled feet after bathing them in a plastic pan. A couple and their grown son from Alberta come, peel off their clothes to reveal bathing suits, and get down into the cold water for a radioactive baptism.

Nearly everyone hauls away plastic jugs filled with the tonic to drink and wash with at home. There is no charge for water to go.

"It sounds fantastic when someone tells you about these mines," says silver-haired Muriel Hepple, 63, a grade-school teacher from Vancouver and a 10-year veteran of the Merry Widow, as she knits and purls her way toward a sweater in the cave.

"When I told my doctor about it he slammed the receiver down. But even for people who don't think it works, it works." Hepple says the effects of the gas last about a year. When she begins to feel the twinges of arthritis, she says, it's time to make another trip to the Merry Widow and gas up.

Those who make the sojourn to the health mines are well aware these visits are frowned on by science. But they don't care. "At first I thought it was a bunch of hooey," says Wally Harris, a stocky, red-faced, retired security guard from Tyler, Texas, who suffered from arthritis for several years. "But one morning I woke up and I wasn't hurting anymore. I threw away my pain pills.

"People say it's all in your head," he continues, "but there was a man camped behind us one time with a big old boxer bulldog. That dog couldn't walk and he even had to carry it outside to do its business. He carried it up to the mine for four mornings straight. By the fifth morning that dog was trotting around like a pup." One ancient poodle that took the cure here supposedly began frolicking so much it died of a heart attack.

Critics say the stress-free, relaxing "Camp Radon" atmosphere is really what soothes those in pain. Stress affects the severity of the disease, says Bill Jarvis, a professor of public health and preventive medicine at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and anything that lessens stress can make people feel better.

"I don't know of any evidence that the gas in the mines works," says Jarvis. "It's the act of traveling to special places. A week off the job, away from home and rest and travel can make it work."

"Pain, stress and depression are a spiral down," adds Dr. Floyd Pennington, former medical director for the Atlanta, Ga.-based Arthritis Foundation. "More pain causes more stress, which causes more depression and so on. If you break the cycle by reducing stress, the depression and the pain can lift."

Health-miners pooh-pooh those ideas. They believe radon stimulates the pituitary gland, a small, cherry-sized gland attached to the base of the brain which emits chemicals that control metabolism. Radon gas, they hold, causes the pituitary gland to boost its production of natural ACTH and cortisone, two steroids that are used to treat arthritis, but which, in their synthetic form, can have serious side effects.

The EPA and the Surgeon General say radon gas is the second leading cause (after smoking) of lung cancer in the United States, but both Pennington and health officials in Montana say there is no health threat at the level of exposure mine-sitters experience. "Levels are so low people won't be hurt by going into the mines," says Pennington. Radon only becomes a serious health problem, experts say, when it seeps into a home and people are exposed to it round the clock for long periods of time.

Jim Robbins writes in Helena, Montana.]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays1994/06/27 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleMontana town puts out unwelcome mathttp://www.hcn.org/issues/2/49
Californians and celebrities among those moving to MontanaBOZEMAN, Mont. - This quiet, mountain-ringed college town just north of Yellowstone National Park has now been discovered by everyone from movie stars to footloose entrepreneurs and just plain folks.

But to the people who live here the influx is more invasion than discovery. This is how a local artist feels about newcomers: "If I find out someone's from somewhere far away I am rude to them," says H.J. Schmidt, who was born and raised in Bozeman. "I get annoyed and angry. I feel 'you were in your place and it got ruined. Now you are coming to my place to ruin it.' "

It's a problem many Western communities face as people bail out of urban areas. But the real shocker in Montana was an 11 percent jump this fall in property taxes. Fueled by skyrocketing property values, officials pin a big part of the blame on the influx of out-of-staters to Bozeman and other Montana communities.

Bozeman's growth is among the fastest in the state. In 1988, the total value of buildings permitted by the city was $8 million. In 1993 it jumped to $40 million. The boom has many of the earmarks of a gold boom, a regular phenomenon in this state. But instead of precious metals, it's a boom in the quality of life, as people scour the Rockies for a crime-free small or mid-sized town that has what many newcomers call a "sense of community."

It's not that Montana is overwhelmed with sheer numbers of people. Ironically, many people are leaving Montana because work is difficult to find. But many who are coming are concentrating in the same kinds of places, while other, less attractive towns lose population.

Newcomers choose places like Bozeman, a town of 35,000 with well-kept turn-of-the-century homes. Timber-draped, snow-capped mountain peaks jutting into a clear sky are visible from downtown. Trout fishing, mountain biking, hiking and skiing are minutes away.

That has attracted a constellation of Hollywood stars who are making their home here. Actress Glenn Close owns a coffee shop in downtown Bozeman. Jane Fonda and Ted Turner have a sprawling 120,000-acre ranch outside of town. Just 20 miles away, in Livingston, Jeff Bridges and his wife have a home and own a coffee shop and Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid are neighbors. Near Big Timber, a tiny ranching town 30 miles east of Livingston, Tom Brokaw, Michael Keaton and Whoopi Goldberg have all dropped anchor. Mel Gibson has a spread a little farther east, near Columbus. Kiefer Sutherland, Emilio Estevez, Joe Montana, Christopher Lloyd, Huey Lewis and Andie McDowall all have homes in western Montana.

Such high-profile celebrities draw other people who want to be part of the glittery trend, to the point where many fear real estate will become so expensive that working class people will be forced out of their homes.

While the demand on real estate has shot home prices up, salaries in these small towns stay low. The average price of a home in Bozeman is $101,000, while four years ago that same house went for about $65,000. Salaries of many people who work at Montana State University, for example, are among the lowest in the nation. Montana's per capita income in 1990 was $11,200. The result: Buying real estate is no longer an option for many average Bozemanites.

"It's a nightmare," says Dennis Glick, who shopped for a year here before he bought a house in Livingston, 20 miles away. He now commutes 40 miles a day in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

"I bid on houses where people offered more than the asking price and offered to pay in cash. By the time a 'for sale' sign appears the place is sold."

Tensions have risen along with price of real estate. T-shirts have sprouted in Montana and elsewhere with slogans like "Montana Sucks: Now go home and tell your friends' and "Beautify Montana: Put a Californian on a bus."

Californians stand out since they make up the majority of Montana newcomers, according to a state count of new license plate applications. But all immigrants are likely to stand out since Montana's population - about 839,000 - is sparse compared to California.

Bill Seavey, owner of the Greener Pastures Institute in California, offers counseling and advice to people seeking a move to Western states for the quality of life. His phone number is 1-800-OUT OF LA.

Seavey cautions departing Californians that they are the Okies of the 1990s and they will probably not be welcome in their Promised Land. "Maintain a low profile," Seavey advises. "Change your license plates. Don't buy the biggest house on the block and get involved in your community."

Not everyone is anti-Californian. Vicky Popeil owns T. Charbonneau, a Bozeman store that sells Western collectibles - things like pillows covered with cowboy boot-print fabric, Western clothing, lamps and sculptures in the shape of trout. "It's a long winter without the tourists," she says.

What no one knows is whether the new Montanans will stick it out. The state's brutally cold winters - temperatures can drop to 30 or 40 degrees below zero - could send some immigrants scurrying back home.

The writer works in Helena, Montana.]]>No publisherCommunities1994/01/04 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleYvon Chouinard: A mutinous captain of industryhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/22.12/yvon-chouinard-a-mutinous-captain-of-industry
"I never wanted to be a businessman," says the owner of Patagonia clothing and gear company, "because I thought businessmen were real greaseballs. In fact I still do.""I never wanted to be a businessman," says the owner of Patagonia clothing and gear company, "because I thought businessmen were real greaseballs. In fact I still do." Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/22.12/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherPoliticsArchive1990/06/18 15:40:00 GMT-6ArticleFBI changes four with attack on power linehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/21.12/fbi-changes-four-with-attack-on-power-line
On May 30, a flare broke the darkness of an Arizona desert evening, a signal for some 30 FBI agents and a helicopter to move in to arrest two men and a woman authorities claim were attempting to fell a tower that carries high-voltage lines to a water pump for the Central Arizona Project, a mammoth irrigation system in the desert.On May 30, a flare broke the darkness of an Arizona desert evening, a signal for some 30 FBI agents and a helicopter to move in to arrest two men and a woman authorities claim were attempting to fell a tower that carries high-voltage lines to a water pump for the Central Arizona Project, a mammoth irrigation system in the desert. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.12/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1989/06/19 14:50:00 GMT-6ArticleNevada fights its second nuclear warhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/21.9/nevada-fights-its-second-nuclear-war
The U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to place the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository on federal land adjacent to a former nuclear test site.The U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to place the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository on federal land adjacent to a former nuclear test site. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.9/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1989/03/08 16:45:00 GMT-6ArticleInvisible gold fuels Elko's boomhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/21.3/invisible-gold-fuels-elkos-boom
The discovery of rich gold deposits in the brown Tuscarora Mountains northwest of Elko, Nev., has ignited a latter day gold rush.The discovery of rich gold deposits in the brown Tuscarora Mountains northwest of Elko, Nev., has ignited a latter day gold rush. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.3/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1989/02/13 17:55:00 GMT-6ArticleDiscouraging words in Montanahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/discouraging-words-in-montana
Miles City, a community of 10,000 which has spent 100 years living and breathing ranching, is experiencing traumatic change as economic and other forces shove the family ranch off the Western stage.Miles City, a community of 10,000 which has spent 100 years living and breathing ranching, is experiencing traumatic change as economic and other forces shove the family ranch off the Western stage. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1988/09/26 12:05:00 GMT-6ArticleHurling sand into society's gearshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/20.8/hurling-sand-into-societys-gears
Earth First! was born in the spring of 1980. Between tequila and beers and camping beneath the stars in the desert near a tiny Mexican border town, four men dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity hatched the notion of a group that was part Sierra Club, part Hell's Angels, part Yippie.Earth First! was born in the spring of 1980. Between tequila and beers and camping beneath the stars in the desert near a tiny Mexican border town, four men dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity hatched the notion of a group that was part Sierra Club, part Hell's Angels, part Yippie. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.8/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1988/04/25 16:05:00 GMT-6ArticleBeauty, isolation and cheap land bring a sect to Montanahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/19.17/beauty-isolation-and-cheap-land-bring-a-sect-to-montana
The Church Universal and Triumphant, a wealthy religious group from southern California, recently moved to a ranch called the Royal Teton on the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park.The Church Universal and Triumphant, a wealthy religious group from southern California, recently moved to a ranch called the Royal Teton on the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.17/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1987/09/14 13:45:00 GMT-6ArticleThe continuing saga of the West's wild horsehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/19.5/the-continuing-saga-of-the-wests-wild-horse
The number of horses on the range doubles roughly every seven years, creating conflict between ranchers, land managers and those who see the animals as a last remnant of the Wild West.The number of horses on the range doubles roughly every seven years, creating conflict between ranchers, land managers and those who see the animals as a last remnant of the Wild West. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.5/download-entire-issue]]>No publisherArchive1987/03/16 17:05:00 GMT-6Article